The ‘stolen land’ hoax

Pro-Hamas protesters in New York City and elsewhere are perpetuating falsehoods to the extreme.

Leonard Grunstein | May 11, 2026

Efrat is located in the area known as Gush Etzion in Israel. Before 1948, the residents of the Gush were Jews residing in four thriving kibbutzim, known as Kfar Etzion, Massu’ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim and Revadim.

The land in the Gush was legally purchased. Much of it was purchased by Jewish individuals or organizations decades before the 1948 War of Independence.

Following the U.N. Partition Plan, the Gush was besieged by the Jordanian army and other Arab forces. On May 13, 1948, Kfar Etzion was invaded by the Jordanian army, and it fell. After the Jewish residents surrendered, a massacre took place. Only a handful survived the slaughter.

The surviving members of the other three kibbutzim were taken as prisoners of war to Jordan, and all four villages were razed to the ground. The area remained under Jordanian control and was entirely cleared of Jewish inhabitants until the defensive Six-Day War in 1967.

Many years ago, at an extended family wedding, I had the privilege of meeting one of the very few children who miraculously survived the massacre. He was all grown up then and was so happy to be able to engage with family. He was an orphan raised by an adoptive family; his mother and father sent him away to safety in one of the last transports out of the Gush. He thought he had no surviving relatives.

The Jordanian army and cohorts that invaded the Gush subsequently murdered them; they are among those memorialized in the Etzion Heritage Center.

Who can forget the Lamed Hey—35 brave Haganah soldiers on the way to the Gush to help defend the Jewish kibbutzim when they were ambushed by Arab forces and brutally murdered in the Elah Valley? They, like all the Jewish residents of the Gush who were murdered, became a symbol of heroic sacrifice.

Calling the Gush, including Efrat, stolen land is an absurd canard. The only ones who stole land were the Jordanian army, with Jordan treating it as state property. After Israel liberated it, the Gush became state land. No privately owned Arab property was confiscated.

The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty established the Jordan River as the international border between the two nations. Jordan also officially renounced all claims to the areas it conquered on the west side of the Jordan River, which includes the Gush.

Efrat was one area that appealed to Jews at a program in New York City last November as part of an aliyah information session sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, held at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was that trigger and more than caused a now infamous near-riot outside as interested Jewish participants tried to enter the building.

For the second time in six months, masked pro-Hamas rioters tried to breach barriers around the entrance to Park East on May 5 to prevent people from entering, even attacking New York City police there to keep the calm. Those hoodlums were not only mocking the law; their excuse was that their behavior was in the name of Arabs whose land was stolen by Jews, which is patently false.

Thankfully, many Americans recognize the moral and societal disease of antisemitism, and they are willing to join in combating it. The veto-proof majority in the New York City Council that recently passed the buffer-zone law to protect houses of worship is a good example.

As Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks so poignantly said, “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

Now it’s time to scrupulously enforce the buffer-zone law and extend it to schools as well. The slogan “Never Again” must have tangible expression in genuine efforts to protect people from harm; in this case, the safety of students.

Leonard Grunstein is a retired attorney, banker and co-author of Because It’s Just and Right: The Untold Back-Story of the U.S. Recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He is the founder and chairman of Project Ezrah, a nonprofit that supports those facing unemployment with job-search assistance and counseling. A descendant of Polish Holocaust survivors, he helped fund an archive on Jewish life in Poland through the YIVO Institute.

The article was first published on JNS and was forwarded by the author by email.

May 11, 2026 | 1 Comment »

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  1. “In modern discourse, people like to speak as if the Arabs of Palestine owned the land which became the British Mandate, which was ‘stolen’ from them. This claim was made into a famous series of colored maps showing a sequence in which the land was ‘stolen,’ starting with it all being ‘Palestinian.’

    This discourse of course conflates issues of sovereignty and private ownership. No Arab population ever had sovereignty over the land, which had been ruled by empires for thousands of years.
    But the impression given by the discourse is they had private land ownership which gave them a right to sovereignty, having lived in the area for centuries.

    True?

    In reality, about 60% of the Arab population lived on just 12% of the land which became the British Mandate, a small sliver of land called the Fertile Triangle, connecting Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nablus.

    The other 40% of the population lived on just another 8% of the land.

    This despite the entire area being very rural with no densely populated cities.

    The rest of the land the local population avoided, considering it unlivable due to disease or uncultivatable due to hostile conditions of the soil. 80% of the area was Ottoman owned public lands, belonging to no Arab, peasant or nobility. No one lived there, though a small population of nomadic Bedouins wandered it and grazed their flocks. The local population did not live there, did not own it, and did not have a political or moral right to stop refugees from finding refuge there.

    Why? Because Ottoman law held that land local people abandoned and did not cultivate or live on automatically became public lands. The British inherited these lands in the Mandate.

    Zionists legally purchased their lands, about 50/50 split between these public lands and lands owned by absentee landlords (slightly more weighted towards private purchase). Not infrequently, the private landlord lands had been public lands until recently, which the Arab nobility ( called effendi) schemed to buy before the Zionists did, so they could ‘flip’ them at a profit.

    In a typical effendi Arab scheme, they would talk the British into selling some public lands to peasants to farm, for ‘humanitarian’ reasons and to ‘keep the lands from the Jews.’

    These same nobles would lend the peasants – who were illiterate and penniless – the money to buy the land and begin farming it. These loans were usurious, charging from 30% to 60% interest.

    After a small period of time, when the Arab peasants couldn’t pay back the loans, the Arab nobles would foreclose and take the land.

    Then, they would sell it to Zionists at a handsome profit, while telling the poor peasant the Jew had stolen their land.

    This is how real life works in the Arab world, and how you get a century long conflict.

    And that ‘Fertile Triangle?’ Here is the reality of how ‘fertile’ it really was before the Zionists brought the spirit and methods of rehabilitation to the area….”

    https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=122180611766660495&set=a.122100831152660495&type=3